Civil rights activist Robert Hunter Morey was born May 17, 1940 in Evanston, Illinois. As a young man, Morey was active in the YMCA, and the choir and youth group of the local Congregational church. While a student at Princeton University, Morey founded the university's Student Peace Union chapter and the Civil Liberties Committee. He graduated in 1962 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and politics.
During the summers of 1960 and 1962, Morey worked with the American Friends Service Committee civil rights programs, including a voter registration project in Jackson, Tennessee. He then attended New York University Law School on a scholarship, but left after one semester to join the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Sent to High Point, North Carolina, Morey worked there until June 1963, when he asked for a transfer to Mississippi. When CORE officials refused on the grounds that it was too early for whites to work in Mississippi, Morey joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was assigned to Greenville, Mississippi, as a field secretary.
In April 1964 he was appointed to the newly created position of Mississippi legal coordinator for the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a job which he held for about a year. He then worked full-time as an organizer of the Young Democrats of Mississippi. The Young Democratic Club of Mississippi (YDCM) had splintered over racial issues in 1962, and had lost its national charter; Morey helped reorganize the YDCM in an attempt to regain national recognition. In 1966 and 1967 Morey worked as administrative assistant in the field operations section of the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), a federally-funded Head Start program.
At various times during the 1960s Morey was also a member of or active in Student Peace Union (he was a National Council member in 1963), Fellowship of Reconciliation, American Civil Liberties Union, Students for a Democratic Society, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Socialist Party/Social Democratic Federation, and the Young People's Socialist League.
